Microsoft’s Open Source Company Is a Year Old. But What Is It?

Last week, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. quietly turned one year old. The birthday passed without fanfare, but next week, Microsoft plans to host a birthday party at its Silicon Valley campus.

Microsoft Open Technologies is a bit of an odd duck: It’s an independent subsidiary set up to push open source efforts by the world’s most famous proprietary software company. When it was announced, it left more than a few people — ourselves included — scratching their heads.

After all, Microsoft had already set up another entity — an independent nonprofit organization called the Outercurve Foundation — to manage open source efforts.

The difference is that although the Outercurve Foundation is funded by Microsoft, it’s governed by its own rules. And according to the foundation’s executive director, Paula Hunter, more than half of Outercurve’s projects are led by people outside of Microsoft.

Open Technologies is run by Microsoft. So, the company gets more control — a concept that’s not exactly simpatico with the open source way — and more credit for the software that it releases.

Microsoft is still kicking projects over to the Outercurve Foundation, Hunter says. But now it has another place to hand over its code. “There are times when they want to maintain stronger control of the project and align it more closely with the Microsoft brand,” she says. “When a project is much more tightly aligned within their proprietary technologies, it may make more sense to have it reside within Open Technologies.”

These independent entities are important to open source projects — they give companies a way of sharing their source code without painting a giant patent-suit target on their backs. The foundation or the independent company acts as a kind of sandbox, where developers can share and distribute software, and if someone says that this code runs afoul of a patent, it’s the sandbox, not Microsoft, that gets sued.

Back in February, Microsoft’s Gianugo Rabellino told us that Open Technologies is all about speeding up open source development. “We figured out that having a different subsidiary would have been something that would work best in making sure that we are agile and nimble and faster in working with the open source communities at the rate that they require,” said Rabellino, a community director with Microsoft Open Technologies.

To date, Open Technologies has hosted a number of projects that help people who use Azure, Microsoft’s competitor to Amazon Web Services. Azure is a way for developers and businesses to build and run all sorts of software, and Microsoft realizes that these folks rely heavily on open source technologies.

But that doesn’t mean that Microsoft is becoming an open-source company.

Phil Haack, an ex-Microsoftie who’s new a developer at open-source developer tool vendor GitHub, says the Microsoft subsidiary doesn’t mean much unless it really works to open source core Microsoft software, something that would ultimately improve them and the way they work with other software. Open Technologies will only be a success, he says, if helps Microsoft open source Windows and Office.